Question

Hi im new to this and would appreciate any help i could get..I have a toshiba satellite a200 operating windows vista premium. in the last couple of days in won t load past the microsoft symbol at boot up it just freezes the bar keeps moving across the screen but nothing is happening, when this first happened i left it on and after 2 hours it just all of a sudden booted up and everything was fine,but have tried that since and nothing is happening its as if its not reading the drive it works fine in safe mode and boots no problem..any advice would be greatly appreciated thank you.

Won't boot

1. Try installing windows from windows installation cd in CD Drive.If it does let you then just repair the installation.if it does not then hard drive is bad. Try another hard drive and it should let you install the operating system.

Boot into safe mode

by tapping f8 repeatedly while the laptop is booting up, once your onto the desktop go into the programs and features, and click the installed updates tab on the left hand side of your screen. Look for any updates that occured during the time that your laptop stopped booting. Uninstall these updates, reason for this is some updates are known to break the operating system and booting into safe mode and uninstalling them are fairly common. I would also take note of which updates you uninstall and only do manual microsoft updates for awhile.

Couple of things to try...

1) I had this same thing occur on a home-built after trying to boot Linux, and it changed something in the BIOS. I reset the BIOS to its prior state, and everything was back to normal.

2) On the OFF CHANCE that it is actually the HDD, one thing to check: is it well-vented? I have a system at home that overheats if I set it against a desk. I kill the power for about 8 hours, repower it, and it comes up fine.

hey

hey i tried what u said and i turnrd it off and plugged it out for a few hours and turned it on and it started up ok but its as if its only reading the hard drive in snatches it takes ever to move the mouse on to something the hard drive light keeps flashing only every 3 to secs consistantly

So start with the HDD Makers Testing Utility

If the HDD fails the Makers Test you need to remove it and fit just the HDD to a different computer and test again. If it still fails the HDD is dead and needs to be replaced. But if ti passes the second test either the Data Lead to the HDD, the M'Board or Power Supply needs replacing. You can check the Data Lead by fitting it to the HDD and the Second Computers M'Board and test again with the HDD Makers Testing Utility. If it fails now replace the HDD.

If it still passes change the Power Supply in the original Computer with a Known Good One and retest the unit. If it still fails the M'Board is shot and needs replacing.

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